I am a designer, developer and a dad. I am also a cofounder at SiteBy and ecobot.

Jun 6

Who’s That Site By?

Introducing SiteBy

Who’s that site by? We’ve all asked this question. Or at least thought it. We see a great site and wonder who built it. A great site requires a broad spectrum of talent from a lot of individuals. Oftentimes a Big Agency solely takes the credit, but we all know there’s always a team that made it happen.

It takes a team to build a website. There’s no getting around this.

And while there are great resources like Dribbble or Behance by-designers-for-designers that showcase their portfolios to prospective clients or hiring managers, tools like GitHub, Stack Overflow and CodePen aren’t necessarily friendly for those outside of developer circles. And project managers/producers, writers, strategists? Forget it. And there’s definitely nothing out there that showcases team member contributions centered around a live site, except when those teams win big in digital awards shows like The Webby Awards or design trade publications like Communication Arts.

SiteBy is where professionals in the industry, hiring managers, recruiters and prospective clients definitively answer the question: Who’s that site by?

SiteBy is the first website credits site to beautifully showcase the contributions of everyone on the entire team. SiteBy is where professionals in the industry, hiring managers, recruiters and prospective clients definitively answer the question: Who’s that site by? As SiteBy grows, it will become the IMDb of websites — and you can help make that happen by joining SiteBy. Website credits for everyone, centered not around the individual contributor, but instead around the end product: the site itself.

About a year ago, I got a website development project from a local client and they allowed me to put site credits in the footer. Within three weeks, I got three more good jobs out of it. As anyone in this industry knows, this was a rare opportunity. In fact, the larger the site (or brand), the less likely they are to allow this kind of self-promotion. I started thinking: how awesome is it that it was so easy for people to find out that I built that website? What if there were a resource where people could go and find out who worked on a site? I shared this idea with Lee Lance about 8 months ago, and we started pulling together a plan to build SiteBy.

Our first step was to bring our other co-founder Scott Cook on board to bring the vision to life with a great design to hold the sites and members together — while keeping the visual focus on the work it contains. SiteBy, as a resource for robust, comprehensive live-website team credits works best when there are thousands of members and sites added. And not just individuals with site credits, but whole teams that collaborated on live sites. That’s why we’ve decided to make SiteBy free for everyone, forever.

As a free member you can build a profile page and add your credit for live sites that you can verify that you own. And you get featured on the SiteBy home page. If you decide you want more features, you can sign up as a Pro member for only $2/mo, which gives you the ability to also add credits to sites you no longer have FTP access to verify ownership. Plus you can display more direct contact info and social links to help showcase your work and get you gigs.

SiteBy is in beta right now, and we’d love to have you help us kick the tires. It’s free to join, build your profile and add your website credits. But don’t just join! Join and then encourage your teammates to join and add their credits to the sites you add. This whole thing is about showcasing team collaboration, right?

Help make this vision of a new way of showcasing website credits a reality. Hope to see you on the site.